CHAPTER 27

“Some Corner of a Foreign Field”

Ultimately, Fisher’s concern about the safety of the warships at the Dardanelles had led to the reconstruction of the Admiralty and then of the government. Curiously, on May 25, just as this immense political drama was playing out and Winston Churchill was in his last hours in office, another British battleship was sunk at Gallipoli. And thirty-six hours later, when Arthur Balfour was just sitting down in Churchill’s chair at the Admiralty, still another British battleship went to the bottom. Neither loss had any political impact in London, but to the navy off Gallipoli and the thousands of soldiers on the peninsula, their significance was grim.

On May 17, Admiral de Robeck had been informed that a German submarine had been sighted on the surface passing through the Straits of Gibraltar. This was U-21, voyaging from the Ems around the coast of Europe to the Aegean. No one at the Admiralty or in the fleet doubted that the submarine’s destination was Gallipoli. On May 25, in full view of both armies on shore, the old battleship Triumph was torpedoed by U-21 off Anzac Beach. As the ship began to list, a destroyer came alongside and hundreds of men stepped from the battleship’s stern onto the deck of the smaller ship. Then Triumph turned over, floated with her keel in the air for twenty minutes, and sank, taking fifty-three men down with her. The cheers of exultant Turks, dancing in their trenches, echoed down from the hills while men in the Allied trenches watched with shock and fear. De Robeck, his fleet suddenly vulnerable, immediately ordered all large warships back to the island harbors. “I saw them in full flight, transports and battleships, the Agamemnon seeming to lead the van,” said the British writer turned officer Compton Mackenzie. “Next morning,” recorded a German officer watching from the heights, “all the ships had disappeared as if God had taken a broom and swept the sea clear.”

The following day, May 26, the twenty-one-year-old Majestic, the oldest battleship in the Royal Navy, returned, anchored off Sedd el Bahr, spread her torpedo nets, and awaited bombardment assignments. At 6:40 on the morning of the twenty-seventh, a seaman on watch called an officer’s attention to the periscope and conning tower of a submarine not far away. The officer looked and said, “Yes, and here comes the torpedo.” “There was a great, muffled roar and the old ship quivered and shook in a terrible way. The masts and yards swayed as if they were coming down on top of us. . . . A huge volume of water shot up two hundred feet in the air on the port side. . . . There was only one thing to do and that was to swim for it. . . . The water was gloriously warm.” The battleship rolled over and sank in shallow water, leaving her green keel protruding from the surface. There she remained for months, in full view of both armies.

Fisher and Churchill were gone, and three more old battleships had been sunk, but Kitchener and the new coalition War Council were not ready to give up on Gallipoli. In July, three divisions of Kitchener’s New Army arrived from England on board the huge, transatlantic liners Aquitania, Mauretania, and Olympic, swelling Hamilton’s force to 120,000 men. It was midsummer and the newcomers entered a landscape of Saharan desolation. Under an intense blue sky, the land and sea were covered by a suffocating haze of heat; the trenches were ovens; hot wind blew sand and white dust into eyes and mouths. For sixteen hours a day, the sun beat down so mercilessly that tinned rations of corned beef cooked in their containers. The sea, Hamilton wrote, was “like melted glass, blue-green with a dull red glow in it; the air seemed to have been boiled.” To cool off, men bathed naked off the beaches, hundreds at a time, oblivious to artillery and sniper fire. (Once, a shell exploding in the water near a swimmer tore off his arm; retrieving the floating limb, the victim carried it ashore.) The flies became a plague; the ground and the walls of tents were dark with them; they swarmed in the latrines; three or four flies accompanied every forkful of food into the mouth. No one at Gallipoli escaped the torture of lice. Dysentery now affected half the army, and every day a thousand men with the disease were being evacuated from the peninsula as unfit for duty. Rank gave no immunity; both Hamilton and Wemyss were afflicted. The disease, Hamilton wrote in his diary, “fills me with a desperate longing to lie down and do nothing but rest. . . . This, I think, must be the reason the Greeks were ten long years taking Troy.” Over the peninsula hung the sickening smell of death. Men who died between the two lines of trenches lay where they fell, the flies settled to feast, and the stench from corpses putrefying in the heat reached for miles out to sea.

As the months went by, both British and German officers developed great respect for the hardiness of the average Turkish soldier. Accustomed to sleeping on the ground, untroubled at being clothed in rags, happy to receive a piece of bread, some olives, and in the evening a thin soup, these peasant soldiers adapted to war and made a formidable enemy. After the war, the German influence at Gallipoli was overstated. There were never more than 500 Germans on the peninsula and although Sanders’s generalship played a critical role, most German officers acted merely as advisers to Turkish commanders. Here, their usefulness was limited. “That evening, Kemal Bey assembled all his regimental commanders around him in an empty tent,” wrote Hans Kannengiesser, a German colonel at Gallipoli. “They all sat in rings on the ground . . . with their legs crossed under them. . . . I at first tried to sit a la turca, but could not do so, so lay on the hard ground on my side. There were no chairs or tables—the Turks wrote with the paper flat on the palms of their hands. . . . Maps were not used during the discussion, of which I naturally understood no word.” The strength of the army was the average soldier’s willingness to accept death as unexceptional. “I do not order you to make war,” Mustafa Kemal told his men. “I order you to die.” Kannengiesser once saw two Turkish soldiers sitting on two corpses while eating their bread and olives. On several occasions, Allied soldiers capturing a Turkish trench confronted nightmarish horror: bodies had been embedded in the trench wall to make up part of the parapet; the trench floors were covered with the remains of separate arms, legs, and heads, all decomposing and slippery underfoot.

Hamilton did what he could with what he had. In mid-July, he asked Kitchener for two experienced generals to take over two of his commands. He was told that they were in France and “unavailable”; instead, elderly former officers, plucked from retirement, were sent out. He asked for a guaranteed supply of 400,000 shells a month for his artillery; the War Office replied, “It will be quite impossible to send you ammunition at this rate without stopping all operations in France. This, of course, is out of the question.” Nevertheless, on August 6, Hamilton launched his final offensive. Two fresh divisions of Kitchener’s New Army, just arrived from England with no experience in war, were put ashore on Suvla Beach, three miles north of Anzac Beach. To distract the Turks while the British landed, the veteran Australians and New Zealanders stormed up Lone Pine Ridge and Sari Bair from Anzac Beach. The casualties were shocking: one Australian brigade lost more than 1,700 men out of 2,900 involved; another battalion suffered 74 percent casualties; within two days, the Anzacs won six Victoria Crosses; but they failed to take the summit. Meanwhile, another column of Anzacs, British, and Gurkhas was assaulting the dominating ridge of Chunuk Bair. At dawn, the 6th Gurkha Battalion reached the top. “We bit, fisted and used rifles and pistols as clubs, blood was flying about like spray . . . and then the Turks turned and fled,” said the British major commanding the Gurkhas. “I felt a very proud man: the key of the whole peninsula was ours. . . . Below I saw the Straits . . . [and] the roads leading to Achi Baba. We dashed down [pursuing the Turks] towards Maidos [on the Straits] but had only got about a hundred feet down when suddenly our own navy put six 12-inch shells into us . . . confusion . . . disaster . . . the place was a mass of blood and limbs and screams. . . . We lost about a hundred and fifty men and the regiment was withdrawn.”

All of this bravery went for nought. Sir “Freddy” Stopford, commanding the troops landed at Suvla, was an amiable, doddering lieutenant general who had retired seven years earlier to battle chronic ill health. His presence at Gallipoli—indeed, in the army at all—was due to the fact that his country, beginning the war with only a small professional army, had no deep cadre of men qualified to command an army corps or even a division. Stopford, called back into service, had been given this key assignment by Kitchener even though Hamilton had named at least three other generals he thought better qualified. In any case, Stopford’s landing had taken the Turks by surprise, but because his men seemed tired and thirsty, he did not push them to occupy the surrounding ridges. When Hamilton arrived a few hours later, he found 20,000 men “spread around the beaches . . . smoking and cooking, others bathing by hundreds in the bright blue bay.” He discovered Stopford placidly presiding over this scene from an offshore yacht, enormously pleased that he had met so little resistance. Hamilton insisted that Stopford’s men hurry to occupy the heights before the enemy arrived. “We might have the hills at the cost of walking up them today,” he said. “The Lord only knows what the price of them will be tomorrow.” Stopford did not disagree, but cordially excused himself from going ashore because “he had not been very fit, his knee was sore from a fall and he wanted to give it a chance to recover.” The British troops remained in place and by the next morning, thousands of Turks were massed on the heights. Eventually, Stopford was relieved of command, but the opportunity, now missed, never returned. By August 21, the Suvla offensive was stalemated and Hamilton had suffered another 40,000 casualties. He told Kitchener that to attack again he would need a further reinforcement of 95,000 men.

Briefly, it seemed that he might get them. On September 2, the French made a surprise proposal to land four new divisions on the Asian side of the Dardanelles. “From bankrupt to millionaire in 24 hours! We are saved! Constantinople is doomed!” was Hamilton’s gleeful reaction. But this French operation was canceled when, on October 14, Bulgaria, having observed the defeat at Suvla Bay and concluding that the Allies would never take the Dardanelles, joined the Austrian-German assault on her old foe, Serbia. A Serb defeat cleared the way for an enemy advance on Salonika, which Britain and France did not wish to lose. Accordingly, instead of gaining four new divisions, Hamilton lost two: one British and one French, taken from him and sent to defend Salonika. “We can’t feed Russia with munitions through Salonika, nor can we bring back Russian wheat through Salonika,” Hamilton noted bitterly.

By mid-October, the sands of the Gallipoli adventure were running out. Bulgaria’s entry into the war meant the opening of a direct rail link between Germany and Constantinople with the likelihood that Turkish artillery on Gallipoli soon would have large supplies of ammunition. Already, on October 11, Kitchener had asked Hamilton for an assessment of the losses that might be incurred if Allied troops evacuated Gallipoli. Unwilling to concede defeat, Hamilton gloomily had estimated that he might lose half of his men. The reaction from London was swift: on October 16, Hamilton was relieved of command. *47 His replacement was a general straight from the Western Front, Sir Charles Monro, described by Hankey as “a cheery old fellow with an odd trick of slapping you on the arm and ejaculating ‘Ja!’ ” Monro had always believed that the Dardanelles was a foolish, hopeless “side-show” thatdiverted troops from France, the only theater of war where an ultimate decision could be achieved. On a single day, October 31, Monro visited the beaches at Helles, Suvla, and Anzac and then—as everyone in London knew he would—recommended immediate evacuation of the entire peninsula. He estimated that the withdrawal would cost 40,000 British casualties. Churchill’s comment was bitter: “General Monro was an officer of swift decision. He came, he saw, he capitulated.” On November 3, however, Kitchener rejected Monro’s advice, refused to order an evacuation, and announced that he himself would go out to Gallipoli. Kitchener reached Mudros on November 9 and spent the next three days inspecting troops and positions on the peninsula. After talking with Birdwell and plodding up and down the hillsides, walking in trenches within twenty yards of the Turks, he concluded that Monro had been right: further effort was useless. He telegraphed the War Council his recommendation that Suvla and Anzac should be immediately evacuated and Helles temporarily retained. Back in London on Novem-ber 30, he went straight to Downing Street and offered his resignation to the prime minister. Asquith refused to accept it.

Meanwhile, the prime minister again was trying to save his government. By early October, the Cabinet was deeply divided on the issue of Gallipoli: Bonar Law passionately favored evacuation; Churchill, fervently, and, to a lesser degree, Balfour advocated seeing the campaign through. Once Bulgaria declared war on October 18, thus establishing a direct rail link between Germany and Turkey, Bonar Law predicted that German artillery and munitions would pour into Constantinople and Gallipoli, putting Allied troops on the peninsula in extreme danger. Asquith sat on the fence. His tactic was to call for reports followed by discussions of the reports; invariably, this resulted in the passage of time and the postponement of decisions. Thus, when Hamilton was recalled and Monro sent out, everyone knew that the general would recommend evacuation. Bonar Law protested, accurately describing the mission as a waste of time. When Monro’s recommendation arrived, however, so formidable was the opposition to evacuation from Churchill and others that the prime minister needed a further postponement of decision. Accordingly, Lord Kitchener was dispatched to do over again what General Monro had just done. Bonar Law, enraged, threatened to resign unless the Cabinet rescinded its decision to postpone the final decision until Kitchener made his report. On November 7, Bonar Law met Asquith and made clear to the prime minister that this conversation must be a final one between them—either evacuation or his own resignation must follow immediately. Asquith used every persuasion; Bonar Law remained firm, and, at the conclusion, the prime minister surrendered and promised that the troops would be withdrawn. Thereafter, although Kitchener did not know it, his mission became only a façade behind which the timing and sequence of the evacuation would be arranged. Luckily for Asquith, Lord Kitchener decided independently that Gallipoli should be given up and on November 23, the War Committee duly voted for evacuation, “on the strength of Lord Kitchener’s views.” One man who saw what was coming did not wait for the final vote. On November 18, Winston Churchill resigned from the Cabinet and the Duchy of Lancaster and departed England to command a battalion on the Western Front. He spent his first night sleeping in a pit of Flanders mud four feet deep, containing a foot of water.

New horrors afflicted the men on Gallipoli. On November 26, a torrential rain followed by a two-day blizzard of sleet and snow flooded and froze the trenches. Men drowned when icy water roared down the hillsides and through the trenches; subsequently, 200 men froze to death. Eventually, over 16,000 men on the Allied side were disabled by frostbite, and 10,000 had to be evacuated. Evidence of Turkish suffering came from a stream of Turkish bodies washing down from the heights into Allied trenches.

Despite the lost battleships, Hamilton’s removal, the gloomy visits of Monro and Kitchener, and the secret decision in London for evacuation, a counter-current had been running through the fleet offshore. De Robeck remained opposed to a new naval attempt to force the Narrows, but Roger Keyes, his Chief of Staff, had never abandoned hope. Before Kitchener arrived, Keyes had made a new proposal: the army need only hold on to its three beachheads while the navy rushed a squadron through the Straits into the Sea of Marmara. De Robeck was a forbearing superior: “Well, Commodore,” he said to Keyes, who was ten years younger, “you and I will never agree, but there is no reason we should not remain friends.” Keyes had a strong ally in Rear Admiral Rosslyn Wester Wemyss, the commander at Mudros; possibly because of this, de Robeck gave his Chief of Staff permission to go to London and personally present his plan to the Admiralty. Keyes arrived in London on October 28 and called on Arthur Balfour. The new First Lord, lying back in his armchair with his knees as high as his head, listened for two hours while Keyes poured out his appeal. Then Balfour stood up, rang for tea, and said, “It is not often that when one examines a hazardous enterprise—and you will admit it has its hazards—the more one considers it the better one likes it.” To the argument that de Robeck, the admiral in command, opposed the plan, Keyes replied that Wemyss, who was senior to de Robeck on the permanent Navy List and who knew the theater equally well, supported the plan and therefore should be placed in command. Balfour nodded and suggested that Keyes make a call on Kitchener who was about to depart on his visit to Gallipoli. The field marshal listened and urged Keyes to go back to the Admiralty and get a firm commitment to the naval attack. That evening, November 3, Kitchener sent a message to Birdwood, who was temporarily in command at Gallipoli:

Most secret. Decipher yourself. . . . You know Monro’s report. I leave here tomorrow night to come out to you. Have seen Commodore Keyes, and the Admiralty will, I believe, agree naval attempt to force the Straits. We must do what we can to help them, and I think as soon as ships are in the Marmara, we should seize and hold the Bulair isthmus. . . . The admiral will probably be changed and Wemyss given command to carry through the naval part of the work. . . . We must do it right this time. I absolutely refuse to sign orders for evacuation, which I think would condemn a large percentage of our men to death or imprisonment.

The morning of November 4 was the high-water mark for Keyes’s mission to London and for his plan to rush the Straits. The Admiralty, temporarily moved by Keyes’s enthusiasm, ordered four more old battleships, Hibernia, Zealandia, Albemarle, and Russell, plus four destroyers and twenty-four trawlers, to the Dardanelles. Balfour sent a message to de Robeck tactfully saying that the admiral probably was tired and ought to come home on leave for at least a month. That afternoon, however, the political tide began to turn. Kitchener, before leaving that night on his own visit to the Aegean, attended a meeting of the War Council where it was decided that a new naval attempt could only be authorized in support of a major new offensive by the army. As there were no fresh troops to launch such an offensive—all reinforcements for the Mediterranean were going to Salonika—the ministers decided that a naval attack by itself would be pointless. On November 7, the prime minister promised Bonar Law that the army would be evacuated. Keyes, however, was unaware of either of these decisions and returned to the Aegean believing that his plan would be approved. On November 18, however, he saw Kitchener, who by then had visited Gallipoli. “I have seen the place,” he said to Keyes. “It is an awful place and you will never get through.” Kitchener by then had made his own recommendation that Suvla and Anzac be evacuated and Cape Helles held.

Still, Keyes did not give up. On November 25, de Robeck departed on leave and Sir Rosslyn Wester Wemyss assumed command of the fleet in the Aegean. Thereafter, Wemyss joined Keyes in ceaseless advocacy of a renewed naval attack. On November 28, Wemyss proposed to the Admiralty that eight old battleships, four light cruisers, and ten destroyers make the attempt, followed by four battleships acting as supply vessels. Fitted with mine bumpers, the ships would enter the Straits at dark. Veiled from the searchlights by smoke screens, they would rush through the minefields and past the Narrows forts, then attack the forts from the rear. As soon as it was light, a second squadron of six more-modern battleships would attack the forts from below the minefields. The suddenness of this surprise attack, Wemyss argued, guaranteed success.

Monro, adamantly opposed to any further effort at the Dardanelles, vehemently objected. “I realised,” Wemyss said later, “that in him I had an opponent to our scheme who would never deviate from his attitude of hostility towards it.” Even so, for a short while, it seemed that Wemyss and Keyes might be given their chance. On December 2, Wemyss was appointed acting vice admiral, and the Admiralty asked how much time would be needed to reembark two divisions at Salonika and bring them back to Mudros. “All indications seemed pointing to fulfillment of our hopes,” Wemyss said later, “when on December 8, I received a personal telegram from the Admiralty announcing that: ‘in the face of unanimous military opinion, H.M. Government have decided to shorten the front by evacuating Anzac and Suvla.’ ” Wemyss called the decision “a disastrous mistake . . . [that] seemed to show that military opinion had prevailed and that the Western [Front] school had gained the day. . . . That naval action would have involved heavy losses is probable, but the sacrifice would have been no greater than those offered up almost daily on the Western Front with less chance of success. . . . The results of success would have been far more reaching than in any other theatre of war. Once through the Narrows: Turkey would become a negligible factor, Russia would be rejoined to the Allies, Egypt would be saved and the end of the war brought within measurable distance.” Encouraged by Keyes and believing, because the government, the Admiralty, and Kitchener had so often waffled before, that this latest decision might still be reversed, Wemyss cabled Balfour: “The Navy is prepared to force the Straits and control them for an indefinite period cutting off all Turkish supplies to peninsula.” He attacked Monro by name: “The ‘unanimous military opinion’ referred to has, I feel certain, been greatly influenced by Sir Charles Monro. . . . A few days ago General Monro remarked to me, ‘If you succeed and occupy Gallipoli and even Constantinople, what then? It would not help us in France or Flanders.’ I mention this to show that he has quite failed to realize the significance of the . . . Near East.” Wemyss’s conclusion was emphatic: “I consider evacuation disastrous, tactically and strategically. . . . I am convinced that the time is ripe for a vigorous offensive and I am confident of success.”

Wemyss’s telegram elicited two negative replies from London: a curt, official message from the Admiralty and a gentler, personal message from the First Lord. The official telegram said that the Admiralty was not prepared to authorize the navy singlehandedly to attempt to force the Narrows and act in the Sea of Marmara, cut off from its supplies. As reasons, the Admiralty cited the opinion of “responsible generals and the great strain thrown on naval and military resources by the operations in Greece.” In any case, the Admiralty declared, “the decision of the Government to evacuate Suvla and Anzac will not be further questioned by the Admiralty.” Balfour’s personal message elaborated: “I view with deepest regret abandonment of Suvla and Anzac. But the military authorities are clear that those cannot be made tenable against an increased artillery fire while the Admiralty hold that the naval arguments against forcing the Straits are overwhelming. . . . Whilst success is most doubtful, very heavy losses are certain. . . . This would be represented as a heavy blow at our naval supremacy.” Wemyss gave up and prepared to obey orders.

The evacuation of Gallipoli—in contrast to most other aspects of the campaign—was carried out with extraordinary efficiency and success. When the government’s decision reached the Aegean, there were 83,000 men, 200 artillery pieces, and 5,000 horses and mules in the Anzac-Suvla beachhead. The evacuation began in secrecy on December 12 and continued nightly. To help keep the withdrawal a secret by creating the illusion of normality, empty supply boxes were ferried in during the day. By the afternoon of December 18, 40,000 men, half of the force at Anzac-Suvla, had quietly climbed into boats and disappeared over the sea. Another 20,000 were taken off on the single night of the eighteenth and the last 20,000 in a dense fog on the night of the nineteenth. In the darkness, so that the Turks would not realize that the lines were deserted, fixed rifles were rigged to fire automatically. Water dripping into a tin or candles burning through strings pulled the triggers of the abandoned rifles so that for half an hour after the troops left, shots were still being fired from the British trenches. By dawn on December 20, both Anzac and Suvla had been totally evacuated, with only one man wounded. The extent of this British talent for retreat was hailed by a German military correspondent writing in the Vossische Zeitung: “As long as war exists . . . [this evacuation] will stand in the eyes of students of the strategy of retreat as a masterpiece which up to now has never been attained.”

Thirteen miles south of Anzac and Suvla, 35,000 Allied soldiers still remained ashore at Cape Helles. The men were withdrawn, moving in darkness and complete silence along carefully prearranged march routes marked by thick lines of chalk or white flour, while more unmanned rifles fired into the night. On the afternoon of January 7, when the garrison was down to 19,000, Sanders guessed that the Allies were leaving and ordered an attack. Turkish artillery battered the Allied trenches for four hours, but when the Turkish infantry started over the top, the British saw something they had never seen before at Gallipoli: the Turkish infantry was refusing to charge. Turkish officers shouted and struck at their men, but the soldiers, who sensed that the British were departing, would not move forward. That night and the next, the remaining Allied soldiers went down to the boats and by 4:00 a.m. on the ninth, no one remained on shore. Time-fused bombs blew up abandoned ammunition dumps and caused the only Allied casualty in the entire Gallipoli evacuation: a sailor was killed when a piece of debris fell into his boat as it was leaving the beach. When daylight came and the beaches were deserted, hordes of ragged, hungry Turks who had been living on olives and bread rushed down and threw themselves onto the piles of abandoned corned beef, biscuits, cakes, and jam. One of the final victims at Gallipoli was a Turkish soldier who died from eating too much English marmalade.

During the eight and a half months of the campaign, the Allied nations had landed half a million men on Gallipoli. More than half of these became casualties; 50,000 died, the rest were wounded. The 29th Division, which had arrived on the peninsula with 17,600 men, and been fed constant replacements, had suffered 34,011 casualties of whom 9,011 were killed or miss-ing, 11,000 wounded, and 14,000 incapacitated by disease. Overall, the British, Anzac, and Indian armies endured 205,000 casualties and the French 47,000. Turkish casualties could only be estimated, even by the Turks, but the figure is between 250,000 and 350,000. Gallipoli also became a graveyard of British careers: Carden’s, Hamilton’s, Stopford’s, Fisher’s, and—so it seemed for many years—Churchill’s. Kitchener survived in office, but the aura of omniscience and omnipotence had been stripped away.

Long after the campaign and the war were over, frustration still gripped the men who had advocated that the navy force the Dardanelles: Wemyss, Keyes, and Churchill. Wemyss, on returning to England, saw the First Lord and found him languidly philosophical. “Mr. Balfour,” Wemyss wrote to Keyes, “was most sympathetic and assured me that he had been in sympathy with our plans from the very beginning. . . . He told me that he had been out-voted all around and ended up saying, ‘Well, it is no use crying over spilt milk.’ ” The “spilt milk,” Wemyss cried out, were “the invaluable lives and treasures squandered on this campaign. To what good were they sacrificed?” Keyes noted bitterly that the great Allied army sent to defend Salonika dug itself in and awaited an attack “which was never delivered and was probably never seriously contemplated by the enemy.” Keyes also called on Balfour, who said that “he had always felt convinced that I was right about forcing the Dardanelles. . . . He said that he was a constitutional minister and had to be guided by his Sea Lords and that they had declared that we should lose twelve ships. I could not refrain from retorting that not one of his Sea Lords had any experience at the Dardanelles or had ever seen a shot fired in war.” Winston Churchill carried the political scars of the Dardanelles and Gallipoli for twenty-five years, until, in 1940, he became prime minister. Nevertheless, looking back on the great adventure, he was to say, “Searching my heart, I cannot regret the effort. It was good to go as far as we did. Not to persevere—that was the crime.”